DailyPost 839
SHOOTING AN EXPERIENCE?
Pictures are everywhere and for everything. Text is giving way to pictures is not an exaggeration. Sharing adds immense value to it. The visual medium has become an integral part of our daily lives. How it took over all of us, we did not even realise! From the analog to the digital camera and it’s technological scaling up and finally getting subsumed in the smartphones is in short the story of pictures. Video got added to it. Phone became a complete social tool, communication was presumed to happen. Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and the like and YouTube leading the video front, choices are endless, there is no social life without social media. Shooting is the name of the game.
It happens everywhere all the time. Shooting itself has become an experience. No nook and cranny is beyond the reach of this diehard photographer, who is out to document every second of his elevated life; the digital life. The locations add glamour, the risks notwithstanding. While boarding an aircraft, precariously balanced on rocks on the sea, with the elevator going the other way, on the edges of a railway platform; he has endless options. No photographer would have ever shot there. On the simpler side, during preparation of a dish, when the table is laid and while eating can only complete the dinner party. Are we shooting an experience or shooting down the experience or the experience is the process of shooting, making it public or the filtered compliments that follow?
Any event, function or social or official purpose and it’s visual documentation should remain as unobstrusive as possible, to enable the participants to live that experience. It is for that reason human interactions and experiences are unique. Mediated by the all pervasive lust of pictures, every experience is a pose and calibrated for a different experience. The dopamine of the social media. At times you get a feeling that in every gathering, a horde of photographers have descended. There are events where nobody is bothered about the audience / participants, the visual documentation keeps carrying on at a merciless pace.
Whether it is shooting down of an experience or exhilarating to a different level, depends on what one expects put of it. Unobstrusive experiences may be a thing of the past. Shooting has become a way of life. Social life is an extension of the social media.
EVERY AGE DEFINES IT’s EXPERIENCES.
Sanjay Sahay